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Tuesday, 9 January 2018

Powerpuff Girls: Season 6

I
didn’t finish watching Powerpuff Girls
for a long while. In part, it was because it’s a shame to see the end of a
classic show, but mostly it was because by season 6, it wasn’t really feeling
like a classic any more.

The
show had been on air for over 6 years by the time it finished, and felt like it
was running short on ideas. Weird and politically incorrect Rocky and Bullwinkle parodies, returning
a monster baby to its mama and poor Buttercup being told she’s got no
particularly special talent over the other girls don’t feel like the playful
and inventive episodes of old. The season plays out without the sparkle of inventiveness
or irreverence that characterised its early run. A steampunk episode, featuring
the Steamypuff Kids, is pretty fun, though.

The Powerpuff Girls have endured in a way that not many similar shows
have. There was the anime spinoff, the spiritually similar early My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and
now a new revival that I haven’t seen yet. The designs are enduringly popular
and rewatching old episodes never fails to put a smile on my face.

But
the problem is that there’s only so far you can go. Sure, you can give the
little kindergarten-age heroes crushes on some boys and have them go from
fist-fighting with their antagonists to going camping with them, but they’re
still funny little bug-eyed kids with insane super powers. There’s nothing to
discover about their pasts and no angsty teenage plot arcs they can go through.
So flipping to alternate worlds of the wild west or making a whole episode in
the style of the Who’s concept albums starts to feel a little like scraping the
barrel.

But
apparently there are enough stories to tell for a new series to come out. So I
guess my Powerpuff adventure doesn’t
stop here.

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Welcome to Adziu's small corner

Welcome to my little blog, here in this small corner.
Over the years I have seen a few hundred animated series and movies, and the purpose of this blog is to house my impressions. This is not intended to be a daily blog with impressions of each episode: I write my thoughts only after viewing something complete. Several have been imported from previous blogs dating back to 2005 - as well as drawing from journals from as early as 1999!
Now, please do sit, enjoy the fire, have a mug of something warm and put in a comment or two.